Publications

Electronic and photonic integrated circuits use optics to overcome bottlenecks of microelectronics in bandwidth and power consumption. Silicon photonic devices such as optical modulators, filters, switches, and photodetectors have being developed for integration with electronics based on existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. An important building block of photonic devices is the optical microresonator.

On-chip whispering-gallery-mode optical resonators such as microdisks, microtoroids, and microrings have very small footprint, and thus...

Optical antennas have been widely used for variety of applications such as sensitive photodetection, efficient light emission, high-resolution imaging, heat-assisted magnetic recording, and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) because they can capture and focus propagating electromagnetic energy into subdiffraction-limited areas and vice versa. However, widespread application of optical antennas has been limited due to lack of appropriate methods for uniform and large area fabrication of antennas, as well as difficulty in achieving an efficient design with small mode volume (gap...

Since the beginnings of the semiconductor revolution, device engineering and material development have been deeply interconnected. Innovations in one invariably spurred development in the other. One of the most important current challenges are developing techniques which enable deposition of materials on arbitrary substrates and the design constraints of devices fabricated via these techniques. This thesis focuses on furthering the materials development-device design cycle for three techniques: (i) epitaxial lift-off, (ii) nanowire growth via the vapor-liquid-solid growth mode, and (...

With the development of microsensors and microactuators, recent research efforts have been made towards utilizing these miniature instruments in biological applications. Flexural plate-wave (FPW) sensors are an example of such a micro-device. They belong to a family ...